At a meeting of the National Rifle Association over the weekend, Nugent, a longtime advocate for gun rights, compared President Obama and the Democrats to an unwanted animal in someone’s home.

“It isn’t the enemy that ruined America,” he said, affirming his support for Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney.”It’s good people who bent over and let the enemy in. If the coyote’s in your living room pissing on your couch, it’s not the coyote’s fault. It’s your fault for not shooting him.”

Nugent also said that “if Barack Obama becomes the president in November, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.”

This morning on CNN’s “Starting Point with Soledad O’Brien,” Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., came to Nugent’s defense: “What he’s saying, I can’t figure out what people are talking about. He’s talking about him, that Ted himself would either be dead or in jail. Now how does that relate to the president? I have a real hard time putting that together. If you want to see how you can be abused, read my book, “The Greatest Hoax,” and see what Bobby Kennedy – you know he wanted to hang me for treason, and so if you want to see some real threats, you can see that. I don’t know what they’re talking about.”

“It certainly is violent language at the very least,” said O’Brien.

Inhofe explained, “To me, when I first heard that, I thought this guy is so offended by what the administration is doing, if we’re going to have to have four more years of Barack Obama, maybe he, Ted, is going to be dead or in jail. I put a totally different interpretation on that.”

Naftali Bendavid, author of “The Thumpin’,” chimed in with Inhofe, saying, “Certainly one interpretation sounded like he was going to somehow attack the president and that’s the reason he’d end up in jail or dead. I realize there may be other interpretations but the Secret Service is taking it seriously enough to go after it. So, I guess I’m puzzled by your puzzlement as to why the reaction has been as strong as it has.”

Inhofe responded, “Anyone can put an interpretation on [it] like that. I just didn’t hear that, because that’s not what he said, and it is confusing, because it’s hard to say why would he be dead and why would he – now, we’re talking about Ted, not the president – and I didn’t quite understand it.”

The Secret Service says it is aware of Nugent’s comments and conducting “the appropriate follow-up.”

“I spoke at the NRA and I will stand by my speech. It was 100 percent positive,” Nugent told the Dana Loesch radio show today. “It’s about we the people taking back our American dream from the corrupt monsters in the federal government under this administration and the communist czars he’s appointed.”

“See, I’m a black Jew at a Nazi-Klan rally, and there are some power-abusing corrupt monsters in our federal government that despise me because I have the audacity to speak the truth to identify the violations of our government, particularly Eric Holder and the president and Tim Geithner, ad nauseam,” Nugent told Loesch.